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An AM Station with Transmitters in Different States

I love watching these threads evolve! What started as "stations with two transmitters, day in one state, night in another" (a tiny set of possibilities - WGAC and formerly 1520 Toledo) somehow evolved into "stations with COL in one state, transmitter in another" (a smaller but still finite set of under 50 AM stations, more on FM and TV), and then turned into "hey, there are border blasters!" :)
 
KFAB in Omaha, Nebraska, transmits from a site across the Misssouri River in Iowa. On the other side of Iowa, you have KBOB in Davenport with transmitter site in Illinois. In their days as KSTT, the studio amd office building property was directly on the Mississippi river.
 
DXBob said:
Here in the Kansas City area, the stateline between Kansas and Missouri runs north-south right through the middle of the metro area.
As such, there are a number of AM stations licensed in one state with transmitters in the other state.
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Do the stations in that market ID with their states or just Kansas City and let the listeners figure it out.
 
I found the National Geographic New York City Area Map from 1964. If I can figure out how to scan it from my Epson Printer to Mac Book, or if any of you can suggest how to accomplish this, I can try to scan it and email to someone here. So far, I have found about a dozen sites on the map. They are very difficult to spot. The WBBR 1330 site is shown on Staten Island.

A lot of the sites have the old call letters on them, including WAAT 970, WMGM 1050, WNEW 1130, WOV 1280, WBBR 1330, WBNX 1380, and WHOM 1480.

Several sites have been rebuilt and/or relocated nearby, such as WOR 710.
 
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Schroedingers Cat said:
I found the National Geographic New York City Area Map from 1964. If I can figure out how to scan it from my Epson Printer to Mac Book, or if any of you can suggest how to accomplish this, I can try to scan it and email to someone here. So far, I have found about a dozen sites on the map. They are very difficult to spot. The WBBR 1330 site is shown on Staten Island.
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Let's see how well I can do this from memory:

In 1964, the NYC AM sites would have lined up thusly...

570 WMCA Kearny NJ (same site as today)
620 WVNJ Livingston NJ on NJ 10
660 WNBC just moved to High Island in the Bronx from Sands Point LI
710 WOR Carteret NJ (1935 site; they moved to Lyndhurst in 1967)
770 WABC Lodi NJ (same site as today)
830 WNYC Greenpoint, Brooklyn (now WNYC Transmitter Park)
880 WCBS just moved to High Island from Columbia Island off New Rochelle
930 WPAT Clifton NJ (same site as today)
970 WJRZ Kearny, down the road from WMCA (moved to Hackensack a few years later)
1010 WINS Lyndhurst NJ (same site as today, but the old 4-tower inline array)
1050 WHN East Rutherford NJ (next to future Giants Stadium site)
1130 WNEW Kearny, near WMCA and WJRZ (moved to Carlstadt in 1968)
1190 WLIB Astoria, Queens on a pier in the East River (moved to Lyndhurst 1967)
1280 WADO Carlstadt NJ (same site as today)
1330 WPOW (ex-WBBR) 1111 Woodrow Rd, south tip of Staten Island
1330 WEVD was by then sharing the WPOW site, but their previous site was in Maspeth, Queens
1380 WBNX was already in Carlstadt by then, down the road from WADO, I think
1430 WNJR might have been in Union NJ by then, or might have been at an earlier site
1480 WHOM was by then at the present site in Ridgefield Park NJ.... I think
1560 WQXR Maspeth, Queens
1600 WWRL had by then moved to Secaucus NJ, but I wouldn't be surprised if a map still showed them at Woodside, Queens

It's amazing how much was on the move in the 1960s - between 1963 and 1970, WNBC, WOR, WCBS, WJRZ, WNEW and WLIB all moved to new sites, at a minimum.
 
Ai4i said:
Do the stations in that market ID with their states or just Kansas City and let the listeners figure it out.
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The FCC rule requires the community of license, not the state

In any case, listeners don't try to "figure out" a station ID; it's there to satisfy a legal requirement and for most stations is neither needed nor wanted... and that is why many stations try to hide the ID inside a stopset or in the middle of sounds and noises
 
fybush said:
Let's see how well I can do this from memory:
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Color me "envious". I wish I had that memory.

I used to be pretty good at being given call letters and giving the COL and facility; I even beat Randy Michaels at a call letter challenge at one of the Dan O'Day seminars but that is sort of an idiot savant skill.
 
Some of the information, especially callsigns, on the National Geographic Map may have been from the USGS Topographical Maps, which often tend to be out of date. Don't we all wish we had had access to the information we now can look up on the internet way back then? The History Cards may demonstrate that the information on the map was out of date in 1964.
 
I'm always inadvertently throwing in call letters that were changed 40 or more years ago into conversations. People like David, Randy Michaels, or Art Vuolo often don't even notice when people do that. They understand from the context.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Color me "envious". I wish I had that memory.

I used to be pretty good at being given call letters and giving the COL and facility; I even beat Randy Michaels at a call letter challenge at one of the Dan O'Day seminars but that is sort of an idiot savant skill.
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I've been spending a lot of time in the history cards lately.

And I'm going back into the ones I wasn't sure about... turns out 1480 has actually been at that Ridgefield Park site since 1948, when it moved from a Jersey City site at what's now Morris Canal Park right across from present-day Liberty State Park.

1380 has been in Carlstadt even longer - back to 1939, apparently. (The current building at that site is MUCH newer, and I didn't realize the site was as old as it is.)

On 1330, WEVD was still in Brooklyn (right across Newtown Creek from Maspeth, Queens) as late as 1980 before moving to Staten Island with WPOW. (The site is now a city maintenance garage for sanitation trucks.)

On 970, it was 1966 when WJRZ moved from Kearny to Hackensack. The Turnpike really wanted that property and moved both 970 and 1130 out of the way pretty quickly.

And there are no history cards available for 1430. That one will take more digging!
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
I'm always inadvertently throwing in call letters that were changed 40 or more years ago into conversations. People like David, Randy Michaels, or Art Vuolo often don't even notice when people do that. They understand from the context.
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I do that all the time, too, and here's one reason why:

One of the most valuable things Randy ever taught me was to learn what the AM dial (especially on the regional channels) looked like in 1941. The class III stations that already had good facilities then are (by and large) the ones that ended up with the most favorable DA configurations and lowest NIF even after the regional channels started filling up later in the decade. The ones that got shoehorned in as new licenses, or that finagled moves from class IV local frequencies to class III regionals later, tended to end up with lousier DAs, higher NIFs or both.

It's not 100% accurate - the 1460 here in Rochester was on its regional channel by the early 1930s, while 1370 didn't get there until 1945 and 1280 didn't sign on until 1947, but even before 1460 lost its old site, it wasn't any better at night than the other two. But it's a helpful guide to understanding how and why AM allocations evolved the way they did.
 
Scott, you may want to ask Dale Bickel about the 1430 History Card. Sometimes they turn up. One in Michigan had just the front index card at first, and later the rest showed up.

It's amazing the things in the History Cards that oldtimers swear never happened. One part owner had to sacrifice a 25% ownership because the other station he had been working for made him a financial/salary offer he couldn't refuse, and he had to give up the 25% ownership before the FCC would let the new station sign on. No one remembered that, but it was on the History Card and it explained a lot of conflicting information.

If you can't find anything, going through annual directories on worldradiohistory.com sometimes helps.

One week in 1972, my mother won a week of usage of the self contained Plant Camper, and we took it up to Harrisville State Park in Michigan. One Night I heard a Top 40 station on 1460 I had never heard before, on the Delco radio in the camper, because of the pattern and adjacent channel interference back home. It was booming in, and guess what? It was WAXC Rochester, "Waxy".

To protect a fairly nearby (<=500 miles or so) Class III-A to 2.5 mV/m usually requires a null. Protecting a fairly nearby Class III-B to 4.0 mV/m usually only requires a small minor lobe. Since the newer DA Software for array design was developed, you see a lot more slightly dogleg three and four tower nearly inline endfire arrays to "steer" the nulls asymmetrically to protect the well protected stations, allowing substantially more power. One station I know went from a linear to a slightly dogleg 4 tower array design and got from 1 kW to almost 5 kW Nighttime.

WAXC 1460 Survey from 1972. I heard some of these in Harrisville in the camper.

 
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Ai4i said:
Do the stations in that market ID with their states or just Kansas City and let the listeners figure it out.
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Many ID as simply "Kansas City." However, a number of the stations do ID with their city and state of license at the top of the hour. Since the KC metro is very spread out geographically, not all AM stations cover the entire market at night with a listenable signal.

Bob
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
And of course, WNNNNNNNBC! Neither is on labeled on the map. Just shows WCBS on the tower icon. Can't find WABC on the National Geographic Map.
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If it's there, it will be in the same spot where it's been since 1943... near where 17 and 80 intersect at Lodi.

Is WCBS shown at High Island or Columbia Island?
 
The map has too much detail for its size. It shows every street. Found Lodi. Found the Intersection if I-80 and New Jersey 17. No tower Icon for WABC. I'll have to expand the map to make it easier to see the Icons.

WCBS is shown on Columbia Island. When did they move again?
 
Just found two more. WNRC (now WVOX) 1460 and WFAS 1230. They appear to be in the same place. Open Street Map has a very similar appearance to the National Geographic Map, but with a lot fewer town names shown. There are no tower icons unless you search for them on fccdata.org though.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
The map has too much detail for its size. It shows every street. Found Lodi. Found the Intersection if I-80 and New Jersey 17. No tower Icon for WABC. I'll have to expand the map to make it easier to see the Icons.

WCBS is shown on Columbia Island. When did they move again?
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November 1963, right around the time of the JFK assassination. So no surprise a 1964 map would show them at the old site.
 
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